Economics and the Second Amendment - Redux 2025

I'm pulling a Grover Cleveland with one of my better G:TB posts because it's particularly relevant these days.  DJ Trump, who also pulled a Grover Cleveland, is not at all Gheorghe and does not read G:TB--if he did he would know that tariffs act as a tax and wouldn't have screwed up our 401(k)s.  I have Marls and Jamboni drafting a complaint right now, let us know if you want in.

DJ Trump recently announced that he will impose tariffs of 25% and 10% on imported steel and aluminum, respectively. The Dow dropped 350 points in response. Naturally, I plan to sue the President.

This isn't my idea--he had it first. Back in December 2017, Trump twat the following in response to a 350 point drop in the Dow:

People who lost money when the Stock Market went down 350 points based on the False and Dishonest reporting of Brian Ross of @ABC News (he has been suspended), should consider hiring a lawyer and suing ABC for the damages this bad reporting has caused - many millions of dollars!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017

I'm not sure what the exact cause of action against the President would be. Surely not negligence. If the President can't be guilty of obstructing justice how should I expect to be made whole for acts of mere Executive stupidity?

I think my best claim is infringement of my Second Amendment rights. Let me explain.

I went to arguably the most conservative law school in the country. Before classes started I was encouraged to read "Principles of Economics" by N. Gregory Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush. I actually enjoyed the book and I dredged it up for this post.

Here's how Mankiw explains tariffs:

The increased price of foreign goods under the tariff allows domestic firms to increase their price, thus resulting in overproduction. The increased price also results in underconsumption. Consumers (i.e., everyone who isn't involved with the manufacture of steel and who isn't the government) loses the benefit of quandrangle C, D, E, and F. This because the government reaps rectangle E and manufacturers take trapezoid C. If your eyes haven't glazed over at this point, you realize that the entire market--everyone involved in this situation--loses the benefit of triangles D and F. Thus triangles D and F are a deadweight loss--absent the tariff, D and F would have been consumer surplus. Instead no one had D and F. Thus the tariff acts as a tax. And these triangles are the direct result of the aforementioned overproduction/underconsumption. This jumped out at me 15 years ago. Seriously, look at my notes in the margin.

This is important because conservatives abhor deadweight loss--when Kudlow, Laffer and Moore are against an economic policy you know it isn't conservative. And if that doesn't convince you, the fact that Democrats and unions support the tariffs should.

I personally dislike the tariffs because as Mankiw explains "When a country allows trade and becomes an importer of a good, domestic consumers of the good are better off, and domestic producers of the good are worse off. Trade raises the economic well-being of a nation in the sense that the gains of the winners exceed the losses of the losses of the losers."

Does that last sentence sound familiar? It probably does. Conservatives always say that the government shouldn't pick winners and losers. Here's what Paul Ryan has to say about this:

Elites in Washington should NOT be picking winners & losers—that’s a recipe for a closed economy—for cronyism.https://t.co/AcHJfVRwTE

— Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) July 28, 2016

Of course, Ryan also applauded Trump's move that helped keep Carrier's plant in Wisconsin. Cronyism indeed!

Anyway, the upshot of this tariff is that it will cost more to manufacture things that are made out of steel (and aluminum). This added cost will, of course, be passed along to the consumer. So expect to see an increase in the price of appliances, silverware, steel-belted radial tires, beer cans, cans of beer, cars and car parts, BBQ grills, BBQ grilling utensils, wire, pots and pans, foil, golf clubs, patio furniture, fencing, fencing swords, plumbing supplies, building supplies, nails, screws, brads, tacks, nuts, bolts, washers, garbage cans, bicycles, ladders, window frames, and mattress springs.

And things like guns and bullet shells. The President's steel tariff is really a tax on guns and bullets, making it more expensive for me to exercise my god-given Second Amendment right to bear arms. "Shall not be infringed" goddammit! I'm suing! And while I'm at it I'm going to claw back the money I lost in my 401(k) just like Trump said I should three months ago.

zman Bouillabaise Redux

A few post ideas bubbled up in my meager brain but I never got around to writing them and/or I didn't know what to write so I'm doing another round of zman bouillabaise, which is like b-boy bouillabaisse but not as good.

1. Jacques Tits died.

Here's the introductory paragraph for Jacques Tits's Wikipedia entry: "Jacques Tits (French: [tits]) (12 August 1930 – 5 December 2021) was a Belgian-born French mathematician who worked on group theory and incidence geometry.  He introduced Tits buildings, the Tits alternative, the Tits group, and the Tits metric."

What more needs to be said?

2. The Large Hadron Collider lives.

CERN shut down the LHC in 2018 but it's up and running again.  I don't understand a goddam thing in that link and this is rob's corner anyway.  Just keep an eye out for Armageddon.  

3. The Supreme Court missed the forest for the trees in N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol.

In his opinion holding that "New York’s proper-cause requirement violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms in public for self-defense," Justice Alito said:

Does the dissent think that laws like New York’s prevent or deter such atrocities? Will a person bent on carrying out a mass shooting be stopped if he knows that it is illegal to carry a handgun outside the home?  And how does the dissent account for the fact that one of the mass shootings near the top of its list took place in Buffalo? The New York law at issue in this case obviously did not stop that perpetrator.

He's correct.  There is probably no way to prevent criminally insane or evil people from committing mass shootings other than confiscating all guns.  But there is some value in trying to limit the amount of shootings that occur, mass or individual.  By that I mean, I don't want to live in a society where everyone around me could be armed at all times.  I don't want to worry that if I bump into someone at a bar they will shoot me because they are drunk and angry that I spilled their beer; or that if I get into a car accident the other person will put a gun in my face in a fit of road rage; or that I will be shot accidentally because some random doesn't know how to carry a gun properly.

Making it harder for people to carry guns outside the house limits the likelihood that this will happen.  The punishment for carrying without a permit is harsh in NY--just ask Plaxico Burress.  He went to jail for 22 months after accidentally shooting himself in the leg in a nightclub while carrying a pistol without a permit.  By contrast, Michael Vick went to jail for about 18 months for his dogfighting ring, while Donte Stallworth went to jail for 30 days killing a man while driving drunk.

We can argue about the proportionality of these punishments compared to the respective crimes, but we can all agree that we are glad we weren't standing next to Plaxico when he accidentally fired his gun that night, and his punishment hopefully deterred a lot of other people from carrying a gun.  Yes, he was carrying illegally, while this decision is about the limitations a state may place on how to obtain a permit to carry legally.  But I think his story counsels against carrying in general and in favor of serious limitations on who, what, where, why, when and how carrying should be allowed.

That's why New York's "proper cause" requirement for a concealed carry permit made sense and should have been upheld.

4. Any debate whether Trump acted up in the limo or threw a Big Mac misses the forest for the trees.

I don't care if Trump grabbed for the steering wheel or his security guard's neck.  I don't care if he threw a plateful of McDonald's finest meats and cheeses and ketchup at the wall.  He riled up an armed mob and told them to go to the Capitol to "fight like hell."  They took him literally and he wanted them to.  Five people died as a direct result, and at least two killed themselves afterwards.  What more needs to be said?

5. WFMU continues to deliver.

I should do another zShazams post but if I do I won't be able to include "Modern Diseases" by Fifth Column because I can't find it on Spotify.  It isn't on YouTube either so I can't even make a Notify contribution!  You can listen to it on the WMFU playlist site.  Here's a Fifth Column song that you can find on YouTube:

Apparently they were "a Canadian all-female post-punk band from Toronto, formed in the early 1980s."  You too can find nifty stuff on WFMU.org and it's free to stream.

Happy Apocalyptic New Year!

I know Marls gets pissed when I post The Test here, but fuck him, we're still cranking out episodes (and filler is needed). This one is about the impending apocalypse, and it's a tour-de-force.

When we started this project, we assumed we would run out of topics fairly quickly, or get sick of hearing our own voices. Neither has happened yet. Our ignorance is boundless, as is our fascination with how we express it.

This one gets a bit dark . . . beware.